Awakening Engagement: The Journey of Revitalizing Our Viva
Cox Communications
AMER| Viva Engage Festival 2024
In this dynamic presentation, learn about Cox Communications' transformative journey of turning a dormant Viva Engage community into a top-performing communications channel. Discover how they secured leadership support, rebranded their platform, and implemented a robust strategy and communications plan that revitalized employee engagement and sense of community. Plus, learn how they utilize metrics to drive their direction and measure their impact, ensuring their efforts align with company priorities.
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We're very lucky for having Devon talking today and she's going to be sharing how they took their Viva Engage community or enterprise network and then revitalized it for Cox Communications. Devon, I'm going to pass over to you and if you can share your screen. Should be up.
Perfect, we can see it. Thank you so much. Thank you, Gemma.
Thank you. Thank you. I'm excited to be here today to share Cox's journey to revitalize our Viva Engage community.
I'll cover why Viva Engage matters and why we're invested, why we've invested time and resources to bring it back to life within our organization. I'll share where we started, where we're at now and how we got there. And finally, I'll share some of our most compelling posts along with the value of metrics.
Before diving into our community and the work we did to bring it back to life, I'd like to explain why this tool matters to us. When I first proposed leveraging Viva Engage as a corporate communication tool, back then known as Yammer, I was asked, what is Viva Engage? The simple answer I gave and I continue to give is that Viva Engage is a digital tool that helps connect and engage employees across the organization. And why does that matter to us? Our employees actively engage in two-way communication, and we've seen with other communication channels and tactics and from what we've heard through feedback and surveys.
Our work environment dynamics have shifted from primarily in-person pre-pandemic to almost entirely virtual during the pandemic and now to a hybrid model. This change necessitated a transformation in our communications to ensure employees feel connected and engaged regardless of their location. And not all communications need to be on our intranet.
We have a specific strategy for intranet and recognize that there are big C's and little c's when it comes to communication. And although the little c's are important, they're not always the right fit for intranet. And Viva Engage has provided an excellent place for little c's and empowered our leaders, whether people or project leaders, to communicate easily and effectively.
And research shows that social intranets boost engagement, encourage collaboration, and drive efficiency. And for us, Viva Engage is about connecting and engaging our people beyond physical walls. Now that I've set up the stage for the why, let's look at how we transformed our Viva Engage community.
When we started, our Viva Engage was a ghost town. It was still known as Yammer, as I mentioned. It wasn't used as an official corporate communications tool.
It existed, but only a few people and teams used it. And most employees knew nothing about it. We had an all-company community called AllCCI, our internal acronym for our division, which wasn't a very exciting or a compelling name.
The last post in the all-company community was in 2020, and no one owned or managed the community. And it was hard to find. If you didn't know it existed, you wouldn't even know to find it.
So where are we at now? We now have a vibrant, growing community. We've rebranded and relaunched the community in February of 2023. It is now one of our primary and most effective communication channels.
The community's posts have earned over half a million views, averaging more than 3,500 views, or actually 3,100 views per post, with a robust number of reactions and replies. We know there's more work to do to continue growing and nurturing the community and our overall Viva Engage environment. But still, we're pleased with the impact.
It has already made in our communications, organization, and most importantly, our employees. Now, let's take a deeper look into the relaunch. There were four key components of our relaunch.
The buy-in, the rebrand, the communication plan, and the promotion and education of the tool. So let's double-click into each of these. I researched Viva Engage extensively to understand its functionality, best practices, and how to measure success.
I reviewed data and information from Microsoft, SWOOP Analytics, and other resources. Since we didn't use it widely across the organization, there wasn't much historical data to rely on, except for one community. During the pandemic, I led the launch of a community for a specific, geographically located group of employees, around 1,800 employees.
And it was highly successful. We learned what worked, what didn't, and how receptive employees were to the tool. Because of that, I felt pretty confident that we would experience similar success with the broader employee base, which for us is about 17,000 employees, company-wide, across the U.S. Then we pitched our research and findings to leadership to get the green light to relaunch the all-company community.
Going in with all the research and data really solidified the case to move forward with the tool. And beyond leadership, we also presented to key influencer groups, who we knew had valuable information to share and would embrace a tool like Viva Engage. We also leveraged our partnership with our IT team to make necessary modifications and support the relaunch.
I'm very fortunate to work with a great IT group that provided fantastic support throughout the process and continues to do so. They may be attending this call today, so a shout out to Jennifer and Kelly if you're on. Next, as I mentioned, the all-company community was called AllCCI, which needed to change.
With Microsoft rebranding Yammer to Viva Engage, we aligned our rebrand with the platform rebrand and renamed our community Cox Engage. We created a logo and a fictitious username for all posts and comments to appear as Cox Engage. We had many new communities develop that also incorporated the Engage into their name because they liked it so much.
We also restricted the all-company community so only admins could start conversations while any employee could join them. We want to be very intentional with what we post and ensure it aligns with what we're trying to achieve with the community. However, employees can submit content for consideration, and much of our content comes from our communications teammates or boundary partners.
And we've received great content directly from employees, so they understand the process and know how they can submit their information for consideration. We do have over 300 communities in our Cox Viva Engage universe, as we call it, public and private communities, team-specific, location-specific, or interest-based, providing ample opportunities for employees to engage and start their own conversations. We did have more and recently did an audit to clean out some of the old dormant communities.
We felt active communities or underutilized communities were really not helping nourish the environment. Before moving forward with the relaunch, we developed a detailed communication plan outlining pre-launch, launch day, and post-launch tactics. So here's just a snippet of that.
We also created community guidelines, the do's and don'ts of using Viva Engage. Since many employees were not familiar with this platform, we wanted them to understand what they should and shouldn't be posting. Our launch day post, which was our first post to the new community or relaunched community, received over 10,000 views and more than 124 comments, which was encouraging for a new tool that employees were still learning about.
We made posts recognizing employees who engaged on Viva Engage really across the platform, as our people love seeing their names highlighted. And it allowed us to feature examples of what could be posted on Viva Engage for those that were unsure. And we published an intranet article, a page on our intranet with Viva Engage 101 tips and short tutorial videos on things such as how to tag someone, how to follow a topic, and just how to find Viva Engage.
And speaking of how to find Viva Engage, we knew that was one of our biggest hurdles initially, given that it was pretty invisible within our organization. We worked with our IT team to permanently add the Viva Engage app to the team's toolbar. We embedded a CoxEngage feed into our intranet's homepage and educated employees on how to find it in Outlook and add it to your toolbar there and other various mobile apps.
So how to find it in the team's mobile app, Viva Engage, in our own intranet's mobile app. We wanted to ensure our employees not only knew about it, but they knew how to find it. Let's talk about content creation and engagement.
First, we needed to define what makes a good post. So we visualized the anatomy of a good post. This graphic has been helpful for those submitting content for CoxEngage so they understand what we're looking for to ensure their content is engaging and compelling, and really anyone posting to our Viva Engage community.
So we share this out to other admins that are running their own Viva Engage communities. Some of the key components, or all the components, emojis are essential for us due to how we embed the feed on our intranet's homepage. The SharePoint web part display we use does not show images unless you click on the post.
An emoji at the beginning adds a graphic element that catches the eye as employees are scrolling through the homepage. Hashtags, of course, highlight keywords and aid the searchability. We recommend keeping posts around 500 characters to avoid truncation.
There is an exception to that, which I will talk about in a few minutes. We try to backlink to our intranet when possible. So far, our Viva Engage posts have generated over 1,300 clicks back to our intranet.
We include a call to action, or as we call it, a call to engage. We believe if you don't ask people to engage, they probably won't. Of course, strong images perform well and videos perform better.
And topic tags help curate content and allow employees to follow what matters to them. Our content covers a diverse range of topics, balancing work and fun. Topics include business content, HR updates, community support initiatives, human interest stories, which always perform well, and even some pop culture.
I'm often asked what type of content should be submitted for Cox Engage. There's also a perception about the type of content found on Viva Engage. My predecessor, Jamie Stokes, who launched our relatively new intranet and is now at our parent company, beautifully described our intranet as the vegetables of communications, essential nutrients for understanding the business priorities and finding what you need to get your job done with a few sweets to add fun and encourage visits.
Conversely, Viva Engage is often considered the sweets with just a few veggies thrown in there. However, I would argue that Viva Engage is more like carrot cake. It tastes, it looks and tastes great, tastes like a sweet, but it has the nutrients baked in.
You're consuming the veggies without even realizing it. So let's explore some of the effective content and engagement tactics we've implemented. First up is our Monday music playlist, a popular post where we share it.
We share it every Monday. We have a new playlist. The playlist varies based on current events, holidays, or company initiatives, and we try to incorporate a company component if we can.
For example, the playlist on the left celebrated National Dog Day. Who doesn't love a good dog post? And we took the opportunity to remind employees of our pet insurance benefits. The post earned over 5,500 views with employees sharing great pics of their pups.
This is just a few. The post on the right celebrated exciting news about our mobile service featuring songs about phones and calling. So we could get very creative there.
We love to have fun and make sure we have plenty of posts to reflect that. We've tackled the big game by asking employees to share their favorite game day treat. We've celebrated the master of suspense by asking them to pick their favorite Hitchcock flick.
And we've honored the greatest athletes in the world with our own Viva Engage games, asking employees to contribute to the Olympic theme playlist or vote on their favorite iconic moments. We had several posts that followed the Viva Engage games where they could participate in our games during the real world games. This slide highlights posts about our people and how we're supporting them.
The post on the left featured a message of gratitude from an employee whose daughter Ava has Turner syndrome. And this post received a ton of really heartwarming comments from employees to this employee and his daughter. The middle post shows a picture of one of our technicians working from his bucket truck with a small child.
It's a little hard to see, but a small child sitting in his yard watching him work. And the post on the right reminds employees of the free membership to the comp app, asking them to share their favorite features or meditations. We've seen successful videos and encourage people to include them whenever possible.
Here's just a few examples. We gave a behind the scenes look at a tech expo we participated in. We learned about an employee's career journey and recognized the great work of our volunteers during volunteer month.
And I'm particularly proud of this post. The safety team initially wanted this post on our intranet as you see it here, which is not the type of content we would post on our intranet. But we saw an opportunity to pitch Cox Engage instead.
Although they were a little reluctant, they agreed to do that. And it really exceeded expectations. It received over 10,000 views and 594 comments.
It probably would have received more comments, but we did turn the comments off at the end of the contest. Far more engagement than we would have seen on our intranet for this type of content, even though we would not have posted this type of content there. It blew them away and definitely achieved what they were trying to achieve.
And it's just a great place to put this. Again, the little C is important to them. Just didn't fit into the intranet world.
Here's an interesting comparison. It's that time of year for self-evaluations. We're probably all going through that.
We posted an article on our intranet, which is at the top right, and featured it at the top of our homepage of our intranet in the hero section. To date, it has earned a little over 2,400 views. We posted the same information on Cox Engage as a Viva Engage article and a featured conversation, which is what you're seeing on the left.
To date, it has earned over 5,900, actually over 6,000 views now. And it's funny, I've had to keep updating this presentation because the views keep going up and up and up every day. It goes up by hundreds or even 1,000.
So it's actually earned over 6,100 views. We continue to monitor performance like this to better understand how the same content is received on each platform. And I'm all for cross-promoting content.
I think you have to put the content where your audience is at. And our audience are all over the place because they do different things and they receive information different ways and through different devices. But it's also about positioning it the right way based on the channel.
You wouldn't necessarily take a full intranet article and stick it on Viva Engage. In this situation, we kind of did that, but we used the article functionality in Viva Engage. If you've not experienced that, it's amazing.
It's a perfect fit for this type of content, in my opinion. The article and the featured conversation functionality, what that does, if you're not familiar with that, it takes your content and it pushes it to your members' home feed, to the top of their home feed until they see it, and then it leaves the top of the home feed. It's a great way to push content in a non-aggressive way and get that information out there.
It is available with a Microsoft Communication and Communities license, a CNC license, which also allows you to schedule posts, which has been a huge game changer for us, not having to actually sit there and hit post for every single post. We can schedule a week's worth, a month's worth, whatever we'd like to do. If you've not looked into a CNC license, I highly recommend it.
Then I've shared a lot of metrics throughout this presentation. As a metric-driven person, I value data. I value the data I can pull from Microsoft, from SWOOP Analytics.
It helps me make better decisions. It helps me convey the value of Viva Engage, and it helps me educate other Viva Engage users, especially admins of other communities. They don't necessarily have all these metrics at their fingertips, or they don't even know what they should be looking for, so any information I can provide them will make their communities better, which will make our Viva Engage universe as a whole better.
One way I've done this is by providing a quarterly update on how our employees are using the platform. This graphic highlights metrics from SWOOP, showing the best times to post, the impact of attachments, asking for engagement, and at mentions. It's really important for me to get this information in front of the people I'm supporting, and the other admins in the Viva Engage universe, because it matters.
How they position their content matters if they're going to get engagement. Oftentimes, they'll come to me and say, well, I'm not getting good engagement in my community, and I look at their posts, and they don't contain these key elements that really help drive that engagement. Giving this to them in an easy-to-digest and read format has been very helpful.
And again, reviewing and sharing this information ensures that our Viva Engage present continues to grow and to flourish. And it also, again, provides them to get the most out of their community, because that's why some people, their community kind of fails, because they are just not seeing what they're expecting to see, and it's all about how they're presenting their content and how they're creating it. So if you give them the tools that they need to be able to position it the right way, they're going to see success, and they're going to continue on moving forward with that.
Another metric that is very compelling is employee retention rate. As shown here, Microsoft Viva Engage premium analytics indicate that in the last quarter, retention rate of our employees using Viva Engage is 11.7% higher than employees who do not use Viva Engage. And if you think about that, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, the average cost per hire is nearly $47,000.
When it comes to retaining or not retaining employees, that number adds up. And it is certainly a strong metric to validate the effectiveness of the platform and the ROI, and is a great number for us to share with our HR partners. And Viva Engage for us has been a game changer.
We've seen firsthand how this tool can transform communication, foster engagement, and build stronger, more connected organization. So this concludes that part of my presentation. I'd be happy to answer any questions anyone has, or go into more detail on any of this information.
Thank you, Devon, amazing. The comments were on fire, Devon, when you were talking. So if you'd like to stick around and look in the comments, we'll go through the Q&A.
So I could see people were popping questions in there. So again, if we run out of time, I think we've got about five or so minutes. If we run out of time, if you're happy to go in and look at the Q&As as well, that'd be good.
And obviously, Devon's put her LinkedIn username on there and Instagram. So please connect with Devon. Honestly, the stuff that Cox Communications are doing is incredible.
So I'm going to start again from the bottom. So Sunny, which community did you pilot for Viva Engage at Cox? So was there a community that you used for us to revitalize Yammer, straight Viva Engage? Oh, is that question for me, Gemma? Yes, yes, sorry. Yeah, so that's okay.
So it existed, right? We had it on at Cox. And as I mentioned, a few groups were using it. I had actually dabbled in it years ago and didn't like it at that time, but when the pandemic hit.
So at that time, I did regional corporate communications. Now I do national corporate communications. But we had a problem, right? We had employees.
Our region was already a three-state region. We had Florida, Louisiana, and parts of Georgia. And then the pandemic hit.
And majority of our employees were not in the office. And now they were all at home. And Cox has a very strong culture of family and being connected.
And we lost that during the pandemic, just like everybody did. And so I remembered that tool that I had dabbled with. And I'm like, let me give it a try.
And I love technology. I'm a kind of a technology nerd. So I will try anything once and even twice.
And so we didn't have anything to lose, to be quite honest. So we created a, we called it Southeast Social at that time, because it was for the Southeast region. And we just promoted it through all of our normal digital channels.
And it just, it was like caught on like fire. It was just amazing. And so when I got my current role as a corporate communicator, I was like, you know, it's one of my first tasks.
One of the first missions I want to do is I want to launch this company-wide. We had this awful dormant account called AllCCI. What does that even mean? Nobody was using it.
But I really felt there was a ton of potential from what we saw from the 1800 employees. We kind of trialed it with. And so luckily my leadership kind of gave me the green light.
They're like, go for it. And it's just been a game changer. I think it's really surprised a lot of people that maybe used it before.
And that's one of the biggest hurdles. The people that used it before, they didn't like it. We have to make them see that it's new and it's different and it's better.
And so that's probably been a challenge too of those early, early adopters who didn't have the same experience because it just, when there's nobody at the playground, the playground's not fun, right? So now we've got more people in the playground. So come back and jump on the swings because it's a lot more fun now. That's amazing.
And it is definitely that change curve. I saw exactly the same thing, Devin. You've got the what's in it for me.
And when people start seeing the true value of using tools like Viva Engage, it can completely transform the way that you communicate, the way that you work, the way that you solve problems. So talking about then solving problems and support, Ty has asked, what has been the best way for you to get your training support materials out during your relaunch? Yeah, so we have a pretty active intranet and so we put a lot there. We got in front of as many people as we could.
We have a lot of meetings at Cox. We have a lot of work groups and just partnerships. And so that requires meetings.
So any affinity group we can get in front of, those folks have a lot of information to share. So we're like, we need to get them on board. Any leadership meetings we could get in front of because we know how important leadership support, not only supporting the tool, but getting their employees on the tool, right? Any, I mean, any group we can get, you know, team meetings we'd get in front of.
So that was a big thing. We really kind of did our dog and pony show per se in front of as many people as we could get in front of because until you show them, it's to tell someone to go to a platform and start, you know, typing stuff on it. It's just, that's a hard ask.
So we wanted to get in front of them, show them some examples, get their comfort level. So they're like, okay, I can't mess this up, right? People are afraid they're going to say something they shouldn't or, so you've got to get them comfortable with the platform. And then we just kind of continue that cadence.
So we, you know, embed it wherever we can. We have a ton of Viva Engage feeds embedded in our intranet now because we embedded it in the homepage, but we have regions that have embedded theirs in their pages. They all have a presence.
Anyone that has a presence on our intranet and that has a Viva Engage feed, which is almost everybody, they're now embedding their communities into their intranet. So it's like everywhere you go, like you can't avoid it, you can't miss it. So it's really saturating, right? Saturating your employee base with information about it, finding fun ways to share.
So we did those little tutorial videos that were like animations that were fun. Some contests, you know, we have an employee incentive program. So we were able to leverage that and then just, you know, keep on getting in front of people as much as we can.
And we can answer the questions and kind of ease their mind a little. Yeah, thank you. There's more questions coming in.
We've got, I think about four minutes left. And there's a couple of questions on the analytic part. And I know you use a mixture of both.
So how often are you going in and generating? So you use SWOOP, you're using the advanced Viva Engage analytics as well. So how often are you going in and reporting? I mean, I look at it very often, a couple of times a week, possibly, depending on what's going on. If there's something like this self-evaluation push, I want to look at those metrics almost daily because that's time sensitive and we've got to get the message out.
And we want to see what that engagement level looks like. So we understand if we need to like pivot from what we're doing. So we do monthly reporting.
So every month we kind of pull those metrics so we can report up, which is very important to keep our leaders engaged and our leadership, you know, understanding the value. So they don't tell us, oh, don't focus on that as much. They don't tell us that, thank goodness, because they appreciate the value and understand it.
And that's because we keep reporting up to them and letting them know the impact it's making to our department, but also in how we support the company, but also to our employee base, which is really what matters to us at the end of the day. So yeah, monthly consistent reporting kind of as needed for some communities. They don't have access to like SWOOP or the Microsoft advanced.
So if they reach out to us, we'll pull whatever reports they need. I mean, there's just so much information, especially in SWOOP. It's overwhelming, but it's amazing.
At the same time, there's just anything you need. It's there, which is fantastic and has been very helpful. Thank you, Devin.
That's a good effort there for SWOOP. We've got two minutes. I'm just gonna skip, if you can go in and just answer those questions.
But Carla has asked, do deskless workers have access and do they use their mobile devices? And what's the engagement? Yes, that's a great question. And we do all of, most of all of our deskless workers, which we have technicians that go in people's homes. We have people that work in retail, things like that.
So they all have mobile devices or some type of electronic device that they have. And in fact, we've seen greater engagement on Viva Engage from our field technicians, which is our hardest audience to reach because they are on the go and they're in people's homes that they just don't have the extra time to like peruse the internet. They're a hard group to reach, but we find that they're using Viva Engage more so than any of our other channels.
And we think it's because some of those teams already were using it when, although our company, Viva Engage community was dormant, they still had their own team, Viva Engage communities. And so they were familiar with the app and the mobile apps are great. The Viva Engage mobile app is very good, but they can also get through it through teams and through our own internet app.
So there's so many ways they can access it on a mobile device that we're seeing that that's been a great tool to reach those hard to reach, frontline, desolate employees. Amazing. Thank you.
Thank you. And with that, we're out of time. Thanks again, Devon.
A great talk. As I said, the chat was on fire when you were talking. So if you want to go and look at some of those comments and then if you can continue answering those Q&A's and then for the others that want to connect with Devon, I encourage you to do so because as I said before, great examples of how they are using Viva Engage.
Meet the speaker:
Devon Chestnut
Manager, Corporate Communications
Cox Communications
